- Duration: 34 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JV37T612VT407TAC69EDFC63 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JV37T612VT407TAC69EDFC63)
Transcript
[Arthur Menard de Calenge]: canceled, being put back. Section 321 being on, off, on, off, on, off. Manufacturers freaking out. [Michael Houck]: Probably very, very herky-jerky, chaotic, back and forth going on on your end. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Yeah, I was just talking about this earlier with someone else. If you were responsible in doing this with our countries you’d give time to people in your country to adapt to whatever change you’re doing before you’re putting a 250 percent tariff on like everything coming from China like it’s just fucking madness but uh yeah and then and then it’s hard you’re going to make moves because like then it gets canceled the next day and then it’s back on and then right you don’t want to change your whole business like supply chain operation when it might be good, partly go away in like the next day or two or whatever. Right. And then where do you move it? Because like every country is like, it’s just a fucking chaos. Like right now is not the right time to be a brand. That’s for sure. [Michael Houck]: But anyways, we’ll figure it out. [Michael Houck]: Like a true founder, man, you got to roll with it, you know? Yeah. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Yeah. We got awarded US Air Force contract since we last spoke, which is huge for us and a really big part of our business right now, which it’s not all green there either. It’s a big fucking entity to move. And so it’s not in game as consumer, but it’s really bright in terms of future. And this can be a massive growth accelerator if we pay our cards right. It’s not all doom and gloom here. It’s just I feel like I’m doing three jobs at the same time versus one right now. I think I can tell. [Michael Houck]: You seem more stressed than last time we talked, but you also seem more excited than the last time we talked at the same time. It’s very interesting. Yeah, on my end, not much, man. Just doing the Nomad thing. For another two months or so before I pick a new home base. Where are you right now? I’m in Utah hanging out with the Mormons. As one does, you know. Love Utah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, Utah is beautiful. [Michael Houck]: I’m going down to Zion this weekend. It’s gonna be great. But yeah, business is good. I’m finally starting to post on social again, which is gonna be fun. It’s been like a long time since since I was consistent with that. And yeah, I mean, the agency’s growing like crazy. We’re working with like everyone now from, you know, early stage founders to literal billionaire VCs who’ve kind of found their way to us. So it’s, it’s great. We’ve got a little team now and yeah, it’s pretty good. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Awesome, dude. The agency model is what I’m going to look at next after this one. No goods crossing the border. This one’s a fire, dude. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, honestly, I was always skeptical about agencies. I had like a small web dev agency back right after college, but to go after raising venture, I was like, why would I do an agency? But it’s actually really nice because, you know, if you find the right clients, very steady. And if you have the right people on your team, it’s not that much overhead for you. So it’s actually pretty nice. So yeah, so that’s where we’re at. I guess on the content side, where are you guys at? [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Is now a good time for us to jam on this? It’s a really good time. Actually, this was a very timely follow-up. We’re actually investing pretty heavily on the content side right now. Okay. On YouTube and on short form right now. It’s hired a content creator. We’ve got an agency that is helping us build out the whole strategy. And this is a really big focus, mainly because meta for a lot of brands has been pretty inconsistent in the last year or so. So it’s been harder to, I mean, it’s not We’ve never been a brand that wants to be only meta-driven, for sure. But yeah, a big part of what we’re trying to do this year is essentially diversify. Is that the right word? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, diversify. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Yeah, and divest from meta, or at least not continue. Or at least, yeah, have more diversity in where we’re how we’re acquiring our customers and getting the word out. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, plus, I mean, you see compounding benefits from organic stuff anyway, you know, it’s, it’s not just response. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Exactly. So the reason why I said it’s a good time last time when we spoke, I had the appeal more from a personal branding side of things. At this stage, I think words, why the touch bases is interesting is I’ve actually been considering going and buying one of the top newsletters in the EMF. I haven’t done that just yet. I’m doing 50 things at the same time. I need to stabilize our whole supply chain side of things. So this is something I’m thinking about either way, like either buying an existing newsletter and retaining the writer or building our own. The reason behind this is I think what I’m hearing consistently from our clients, our customer, is lots of misinformation, really hard to get the right level information on this. They would have loved when they were doing their research to find a better source of truth. And the flip side to this, and I’ve noticed this when I’m doing dinners with new people, is I always get a shit ton of questions whenever I say, here is what we do, and interest. Now, we’re having a little, and so I think the newsletter format would likely be something that we can we can also like push it on blogs as well, but it’s one format that people would potentially consume where we can bring more, you know, more real information and actionable tips to people. And it’s hard for me because I don’t have that much of a content mind, but when I’m looking at, you know, like, I’ve talked about like acquiring some of the top newsletters in the space. It’s people who literally build a business off the back of like sending newsletters and selling a course on EMF education. I don’t, I’ve written a 14 pages white paper. I feel like I’ve told you everything there is to know, but apparently they’re still finding stuff to write about. [Michael Houck]: People like the little, little consumable morsels, you know, let’s say. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: I’m not a go-deep-once type of guy, so it’s hard for me to shift that mindset. [Michael Houck]: Let me digest this whole thing, and then I’ll understand it and be able to go on with my life. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: You might not be as passionate as I am, especially about EMF. This has been something that was on my mind, and so I would love to understand Your thoughts on if we were I building versus acquiring You know trying to think from an ROI perspective what this would look like and if we’re building it Can you guys support a newsletter like this, which would be essentially more Maybe slightly more research driven And I can give a lot of inputs But there is also some research to do. I don’t claim to know everything there is to know about EMF. And there are actually a bunch of things where I’m like, oh, I should look into this someday. And I don’t, which I think might be interesting topics to people. But the main part is it’s hard for me to come up with short bytes consumable when I feel like I know. I mean, it’s my world for years now. I know so much it’s hard for me to go back to the ground zero. I don’t know anything. How do you teach me in a newsletter format to help educate me over time? So yeah, kind of curious about that. I don’t know if it makes sense for you guys. I like how you typically work when you look at this. I’m happy to send you the name of the newsletter guys that I’m thinking about to compare and see what they do. But generally, also what your thoughts are. Be very much a conversion exercise, ultimately. It’d be getting people on the newsletter, help educate them, having them share that with friends, and hopefully just build more rapport with our existing customers, but also help build authority and get more organic content out that will ultimately drive sales. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, totally understood. The goal is ROI. The goal is get that capital back that we’re putting out there to grow it or to buy it or whatever the case may be, and then obviously to write it too. That makes sense. I think the newsletter is a good format, especially for EMF, which I don’t think is something that everyone knows they should be having. So it’s a good way to build trust and go deeper. YouTube is also a good way to do that because you get your face in front of folks that way. So I think the combination of those, you know, we actually, we have a small YouTube following, but we actually get a decent amount of subscribers for our newsletter from YouTube because their content helps build trust. It’s high converting. So as far as like, uh, how we would work and then I can talk through sort of buy versus build. Um, so we do research for all of our clients. That’s just included in what we do. It’s not just like you have to give us something and then we write based on it. Obviously the more you do give us, you know, the more kind of your, you, your unique POV will be captured in it. We try to capture that all async through Slack voice notes and things like that. We’ll ask you questions, you respond with a rambly voice note, we get that, we turn it into some content. But our writers also go out and do a ton of research every week for our newsletters and for clients too. So very much part of what we do. If we were to build, then basically what we would do is match you with a writer on the team. I have a couple people in mind who I think could crush this. One person who’s been in the sort of apparel world before, so I think could be a good fit. And then we get on one kickoff call. It’d be you, me, and them. And we’d sort of talk through, you know, who the target audience is exactly, what the voice is that we want to talk to them in, brainstorm some content blocks to go in the newsletter and structure and things like that. And then we’d get started getting it set up. So we’d handle most of the beehive ops there’s like a couple things that you would need to do but most of it falls on us and then We can help out with brand design for it, too If you guys have a brand you want to use that’s totally fine, but we also have a designer on staff And then we just go back and you know be writing pieces every week and we get a few weeks ahead So we’re not you know waiting for your edits every week or something like that There’s no time constraints on the on the process. So we get a couple weeks ahead. And then if we were to buy, you know, if you have a writer that you’re bringing over from that, that’s totally fine. We’re happy to help out with like ops and things like that, too, on a smaller scale. But if you have an operation that you’re just buying and sort of plugging into, that’s that’s one thing. I think about the decision is sort of, you know, if the goal is, like turning that cash back through the system to drive growth as much as possible. Obviously you’re putting more upfront with buying, but outside of that, you need to be really sure that like this brand of the news, the newsletter brand is in perfect alignment and like that audience will definitely want what you guys are going to be trying to sell them because there’s no reason to buy it outside of that. Right. And so what I would say is if you’re considering buying, consider maybe running like an ad or two in their newsletter first and seeing the response you get from that. Because the benefit of building from scratch is that we know the people who sign up for that are going to be people who are interested in what we’re doing. And for what it’s worth, we also have some growth stuff that we can help out with. We do social media ads. We do cold email-based growth. There’s pretty good systems that can get, yeah, for my newsletter, our average CPA is under $2 per subscriber. So happy to help out with that, too, if the time comes. [Michael Houck]: But we can also import any lists that you guys have already, of course, to seed it and get it started. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Yeah. How long do you think a ramp-up on a specialty newsletter like this would be? And what conversion do you typically I’m trying to get, it might be easier if you can send me a few bullets via email. I mean, you know, I need to think about it from a ROI perspective of like, okay, I just, we’d market this to our current audience, but I don’t want to go and like plug in my list and say, cool, you’re not subscribed to like author’s world, author’s EMF world. So we can’t, we can’t really do that. [Michael Houck]: And you’d be surprised. [Michael Houck]: standard to do it, but it’s totally up to you. People always overestimate how annoying they are when they’re sending more emails to people. It’s not that bad. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: You’re probably right, actually. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: These are people that are already in our ecosystem. We might convert them better, we might get a little more but other than them, how do we get more people in that newsletter? And what’s the typical conversion? Because we’re talking about two bucks for a subscriber. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: We’re paying something like… [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: We’re paying less on our end for… Actually, do we? No, I just said we pay more. I’m making my math wrong. [Michael Houck]: There’s really, there’s three channels that most newsletters will actually, well, there’s four, but I personally don’t like the fourth. There’s four. One is content marketing on social. So that’s your, that’s your YouTube funnel. That’s you talking about it on LinkedIn or X or places like that. Two is meta ads. Um, that’s, you know, you can do Twitter ads and tick tock ads too, but meta is the best as I’m sure you know. Uh, so, you know, could consider taking some budget from the existing So basically what happens there is we would build a list for you of folks who vetted email addresses we’ve sort of code emailed them to sort of pen test that the inbox is actually active and things like that. And then we’d send them something that was like relevant to the brand, but not explicitly about the brand. And we’d see if they’re interested in that. If so, then we could add them to the newsletter and sort of put them on like a test sequence in the newsletter. And if they pass through that, then they’d sort of remain active subscribers to the newsletter from there. And we do it that way, you know, you can get subscribers for like a dollar, depending on scale. Uh, so it’s, it’s much cheaper. Um, the engagement tends to be relatively similar. I would say you’re going to get a little bit better conversion from paid, uh, paid ads, but from cold email, uh, the actual engagement, the newsletter is still, it’s still very good. Um, and then the fourth one, which I don’t like is a newsletter referral networks. So this is like you sign up for my newsletter. I show you five newsletters that I’m recommending you sign up for a couple of them. And you pay per referral that gets sent to you. I don’t like that because the people aren’t actually signing up for your newsletter. It’s sort of like an afterthought for them. It’s kind of accidental in some cases. You actually see a lot worse engagement from that than you do from cold email, which is interesting. OK. OK. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: I would love to see, like, From there, how do you convert people? Do you do value, value, no product, and then one push on X amount of time? Yeah, pretty much. We’d send the weekly newsletter. [Michael Houck]: Assuming you’d want to do it weekly, you can always do it bi-weekly or something like that if you want to. But we’d lead with value. We’d have some standard content blocks in there that people are used to. We’d get a fun voice so they can engage with it. And then we’d push the product. In the footer, and also like occasionally in places where it actually makes sense organically to sort of do so in the content. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Got it. Okay. And do you build it as an evergreen funnel? Or? Yeah, so it’s kind of up to you. [Michael Houck]: And this is something we’d probably get into on like the kickoff call with the writer where we’re like, Oh, do we want to do it based on like, what’s happening? Like current events? Do we want to do it based on, you know, evergreen essays? Do we want to do There’s like five, six different formats that we could go into. Okay. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Yeah, because a lot of them makes total sense to use the current, like what’s happening right now, but there are also a lot of content that could be timeless. And so I was just curious about this. I’m assuming we can do a mix of both, right? We can, yeah. [Michael Houck]: I think people do like sort of the repeatability, the consistency. So like, that’s why with my newsletter, for example, I do the essays on stats. And I do sort of the roundup of five things I observe during the week on Tuesdays because that way they get both every week If you wanted to do it, like, you know, oh twice a month, you’ll get this twice a month You’ll get this that’s fine, too Just as long as we can set the expectation with them in the welcome email with you to expect from us So you put your essays on evergreen in your news there? Yeah. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Yeah, cool. So like if I sign up today I’ll get the stuff that someone got five months ago ago and I’ll just show the next guy five months on all your essays. [Michael Houck]: Oh, sorry. No, I misunderstood what you were saying. No. So if you sign up for my newsletter today, you get the current week’s like, Essay and weeks like roundup, but the essays are things that, like, you know, I’ll link back to in the newsletter because they’re still relevant and things like that. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: OK, so you still use them, but like more as a source of like check out what I wrote about XYZ back then. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. It’s like, you know, you ever read like, um, like, uh, like stratechery by Ben Thompson. He’s always like referring back to his, um, his like theories from the past and things like that. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: And we try to do the same thing. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I see. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Super interesting. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Um, cool. Yeah. I would love to just see a few numbers from, you know, like, um, get a sense of, of, uh, numbers of other niches and what this… What this have looked like for your customers and a little more information and if you can share the price point with me again. Yeah, that’d be super helpful in taking another look. Cool. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’ll send over an email later today that has like full Notion doc with details on how we work and everything like that and options. And then I’ll also include in the email some context on pricing, on the specific different growth options, and also try to help you think through the buy versus build. I do think that there’s a case to be made for buy. I’m not trying to push you one way or the other, but I would test it out with some ads first to see how they perform. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Yeah, that’s a good point. Cool. I’m glad we reconnected. I’m looking forward to seeing your email. Setting expectations. I am so underwater right now. No responding Yeah, I I have deadlines with the Air Force coming up and And We’re starting a fundraise at the same time which is the worst time for me to do that but I Now is the time, so we’re doing it. No rush over here, man. [Michael Houck]: You’ve got macroeconomic factors to worry about right now, too, so it’s all good. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: I was about to say, but we’re interested, and I’ll also loop in my head of marketing, who’s also busy with his own stuff, but we should be able to connect over that in the next couple of weeks. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, sounds good. Let me know, keep me in the loop with how it goes with the ads, if you’re going to run them in the one you guys are considering buying. And happy to sort of, you know, advise on, you know, oh, how is that performance compared to like what we see with folks advertising an artist’s letter, for example. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: For sure. And if we do end up buying the route of engaging you guys versus retaining the person might be appealing to us as well, depending on what those guys want to do. There’s only a couple of newsletters out there doing that. I don’t know if it really makes sense and if the price makes sense for us as well. There are still a few question marks to be answered. We may do it, we may not do it. [Michael Houck]: They give you some crazy per subscriber price because they’re trying to price in the brand equity and then you’re not seeing that performance of the brand equity on how that translates to sales for you guys. To sort of be a sounding board as you guys are thinking. We’ve bought two newsletters too, so like I know that. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Okay. Yeah. Do you price that off a bidda then or subscriber? Sorry, what’s that? Did you buy that, did you price it based off a bidda or subscriber? [Michael Houck]: No, we priced it based on subscriber, in both cases, relatively small, like under 15k subscribers each. So, priced it based on that and, you know, a lot of factors you should look at like, you know, I mean, you know, this stuff, because you do targeting through through meta and everything like that. But like, what country are they from Like, how recently are they engaging? You know, what is the trend in engagement metrics? [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: There’s there’s other stuff, too. So happy to help. Thanks, man. I’ll keep you posted. And I’m looking forward to reading your email. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool, man. Catch up. Thanks. Good luck.